Beyond Good and Evil

Prejudices of Philosophers

Philosophers have not been disinterested seekers of truth but unconscious advocates of their own instincts and moral prejudices, and the foundational assumptions of Western metaphysics—antitheses of values, the free will, the ‘I’ as cause of thought—are themselves uncritically inherited fictions that serve life rather than reveal reality.

• The ‘Will to Truth’ is itself an unexamined value whose worth must be questioned—asking why we want truth rather than untruth or uncertainty is the genuinely dangerous philosophical move that has scarcely been attempted.
  • The problem of the value of truth presents itself before us—or was it we who presented ourselves before the problem?
  • There is risk in raising the question of truth’s value; perhaps there is no greater risk.
• Metaphysicians universally assume that things of high value must have a pure, other-worldly origin and cannot arise from their opposites (e.g., truth from error, the selfless from the selfish)—but this ‘fundamental belief in antitheses of values’ is itself an unverified prejudice.
  • It might be possible that what constitutes the value of good and respected things consists precisely in their being insidiously related to evil and apparently opposed things—perhaps even essentially identical with them.
  • New philosophers of the ‘dangerous Perhaps’ are needed who can investigate whether the highest values are secretly intertwined with what moralists call base.
• Most conscious philosophical thinking is secretly driven by instinct and physiological need rather than pure reason—the philosopher is an unconscious autobiographer whose moral purpose generates the entire system.
  • Every great philosophy is the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography; the moral purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ.
  • Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ and Spinoza’s mathematical form are cited as examples of philosophers disguising their instincts behind elaborate formal apparatus.
• TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.
• The falseness of an opinion is no objection to it, because certain false opinions—logical fictions, synthetic judgments a priori, the counterfeit of an immutable world—are indispensable conditions of life for beings like us.
  • Without a recognition of logical fictions and a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live.
  • Kant’s celebrated question ‘How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?’ should be replaced by ‘Why is belief in such judgments necessary?’—they are false but necessary for species-preservation.
• The grammatical habit of positing a subject as the cause of every predicate (‘I think’) creates the illusion of a unified ego as causal agent—but a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, not when ‘I’ wish, and the ‘I’ is at best an interpretation, not an immediate certainty.
  • ONE thinks; but that this ‘one’ is precisely the famous old ’ego’ is, to put it mildly, only a supposition.
  • Schopenhauer’s claim that the will is the one thing absolutely known is an exaggeration of popular prejudice; willing is a complicated event involving sensation, thought, and the emotion of command.
• The concept of ‘free will’ in its metaphysical sense is self-contradictory (a desire to be one’s own causa sui), but ’non-free will’ as mechanical determinism is equally mythological—in real life the only meaningful distinction is between strong and weak wills.
  • ‘Freedom of will’ is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition who commands and simultaneously identifies with the executor of the order.
  • Cause and effect are only conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and mutual understanding, not explanations of ‘being-in-itself.’
• Psychology must be reconceived as the morphology and developmental doctrine of the Will to Power—previous psychology failed because it operated under moral prejudices, treating ‘good’ impulses as categorically distinct from ‘bad’ ones rather than seeing all affects as expressions of a single life-force.
  • A proper physio-psychology has to contend with unconscious antagonism in the heart of the investigator; a doctrine of the derivation of all good impulses from bad ones causes distress even in a strong conscience.
  • Psychology is once more the path to the fundamental problems and should be recognized as the queen of the sciences.

The Free Spirit

The free spirit must cultivate deliberate solitude, masks, and intellectual independence to protect against the corrupting pressures of martyrdom, public opinion, and dogmatic certainty, while the coming philosophers of the future will go beyond mere free-thinking to become creators and commanders of new values.

• Human cognition is built on a foundation of strategic ignorance and life-sustaining falsification—the will to knowledge grows from a far more powerful will to ignorance, and knowledge itself loves error because, as a living function, it loves life.
  • Man has contrived to retain his ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, thoughtlessness, imprudence, heartiness, and gaiety—to enjoy life.
  • The best knowledge seeks most to retain us in this simplified, artificially imagined and falsified world.
• Philosophers must avoid martyrdom for truth because suffering ‘for the truth’s sake’ corrupts intellectual conscience, induces stubbornness, and ultimately transforms the thinker into a stage-performer—good solitude and masks are healthier strategies.
  • Prolonged fear and watching of enemies makes one personal and poisonous—Spinoza and Giordano Bruno became refined vengeance-seekers through their persecution.
  • Choose the good solitude, the free, wanton, lightsome solitude, which also gives the right still to remain good in any sense whatsoever.
• The higher man requires direct experience of the ‘average man’—including time spent with cynics who frankly represent base humanity—in order to understand moral reality, but he must preserve his own citadel of privacy and not be absorbed by the crowd.
  • Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach what is called honesty; the higher man must open his ears to all the coarser or finer cynicism.
  • The Abbé Galiani is offered as an example of genius bound to coarseness—far profounder than Voltaire yet consequently more silent.
• It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong.
• Every profound spirit needs a mask because its words are constantly misinterpreted by the superficial, and around every deep nature a mask grows automatically through the false, surface-level reading of everything it does.
  • There is so much goodness in craft—everything profound loves the mask, and the profoundest things have a hatred even of figure and likeness.
  • A hidden nature which instinctively employs speech for silence and concealment desires that a mask of itself occupy its place in the hearts and heads of friends.
• The coming philosophers of the future will be ’tempters’—not dogmatists or levellers, but free spirits in a deeper sense who regard truth as personal, resist herd morality, and understand that great things remain for the great and the rare for the rare.
  • ‘My opinion is MY opinion: another person has not easily a right to it’—such a philosopher of the future will say, repudiating the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people.
  • The wrongly-named ‘free spirits’ of democratic Europe are actually enchained slaves of democratic taste and modern ideas, lacking solitude and personal courage.
• The world seen from within, accounting for will as the only form of causality we actually know, is best described as Will to Power—all organic functions, including self-preservation, are ramifications of this single fundamental drive.
  • Granted that all organic functions could be traced back to the Will to Power, one would have acquired the right to define ALL active force unequivocally as Will to Power.
  • Self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results of will to power; psychologists should beware of making it the cardinal instinct, as Spinoza did.

The Religious Mood

Religious experience, from Christian faith to asceticism to modern atheism, is analyzed as a set of psychological and physiological phenomena expressing the Will to Power in its self-overcoming or self-denying forms, with religion serving philosophers as a tool of discipline when used instrumentally but causing human deterioration when it rules as an end in itself.

• Pascal’s brand of Christian faith—a continuous suicide of reason by a ’tough, long-lived, worm-like reason’—represents a more authentic and terrifying form of religious commitment than the blunt slave-faith of Luther or northern Protestantism.
  • Modern men, with their obtuseness to all Christian nomenclature, no longer feel the terribly superlative conception implied by the paradox ‘God on the Cross.’
  • The Christian formula was a transvaluation of all ancient values, a revenge of the Oriental slave on Roman toleration and the noble’s smiling indifference to faith.
• The religious neurosis—characterized by solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence followed by sudden sensuality and world-renunciation—is a recurring physiological-psychological phenomenon that Schopenhauer elevated to his central philosophical problem in the question of the saint.
  • Schopenhauer’s most convinced adherent Richard Wagner brought the type of religious neurosis to the stage as Kundry at the very time the Salvation Army displayed it as an epidemical outbreak across Europe.
  • The seemingly miraculous ‘immediate succession of opposites’—bad man becoming saint—is perhaps only an error of interpretation, a lack of philology, produced by psychology operating under moral prejudice.
• There is a great ladder of religious cruelty: from human sacrifice, to sacrifice of natural instincts in asceticism, to the ultimate sacrifice of God himself—the paradoxical mystery of sacrificing God for nothingness is the task reserved for the present generation.
  • First men sacrificed human beings they loved best; then they sacrificed their strongest instincts, their ’nature’; finally, was it not necessary to sacrifice God himself, and worship stone, stupidity, fate, nothingness?
  • Whoever has looked with an Asiatic eye into the most world-renouncing modes of thought, beyond good and evil, finds opening before him the opposite ideal: the most world-approving, exuberant man who calls out da capo to all existence.
• The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit, it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation.
• Religion serves a legitimate and valuable disciplinary function when used instrumentally by philosophers—binding rulers and subjects, educating ascending ranks, and giving ordinary people contentedness—but becomes a cause of human deterioration when it rules as an end in itself.
  • Christianity and Buddhism preserve too much that should have perished—by taking the side of sufferers on principle, they have been among the principal causes keeping the type ‘man’ on a lower level.
  • The Brahmins used religious organization to secure the power of nominating kings while keeping themselves apart with a higher mission—an example of philosophy using religion as a tool.
• European theism is declining not because of rational refutation but because God seems incapable of communicating himself clearly—the religious instinct remains vigorous but rejects the theistic satisfaction with profound distrust, seeking other outlets.
  • Outward idleness with a good conscience—the aristocratic sentiment that work vulgarizes—is necessary to real religious life; modern laboriousness educates for unbelief more than anything else.
  • Among German Protestants in trade centers, religion has been dissolved by laboriousness across generations until they no longer know what purpose religions serve.
• Piety and the ’life in God’ can be understood as the most elaborate product of the fear of truth—an artist-intoxication in presence of the most logical of all falsifications, a will to inversion of truth that makes man beautiful by making him superficial.
  • The homines religiosi are ranked among born artists at their highest—the profound, suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism compels whole centuries to fasten their teeth into a religious interpretation of existence.
  • To love mankind for God’s sake is the noblest and remotest sentiment mankind has yet attained; love of mankind without a redeeming intention is only folly and brutishness.

Apophthegms and Interludes

A collection of numbered aphorisms that crystallize Nietzsche’s psychological and moral observations in compressed form, probing the hidden motives behind virtue, conscience, sympathy, vanity, and the will.

• ‘Knowledge for its own sake’ is the last snare laid by morality—claiming to pursue truth disinterestedly merely re-entangles the thinker in moral obligation under a new disguise.
  • “‘Knowledge for its own sake’—that is the last snare laid by morality: we are thereby completely entangled in morals once more.” —Nietzsche
  • The charm of knowledge would be small if so much shame did not have to be overcome on the way to it.
• Memory and pride are in permanent conflict over past actions, and it is typically pride—not truth—that wins, causing the memory to yield and revise the record.
  • “‘I did that,’ says my memory. ‘I could not have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually—the memory yields.” —Nietzsche
  • None
• Insanity in individuals is rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule—collective madness is the normal condition of historical actors.
  • “Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.” —Nietzsche
  • “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster; and if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” —Nietzsche
• There are no moral phenomena, only moral interpretations of phenomena—what appears as morality is always a framework of valuation imposed on neutral events, not a property of the events themselves.
  • “There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.” —Nietzsche
  • With his principles a man seeks either to dominate, or justify, or honour, or reproach, or conceal his habits—two men with the same principles probably seek fundamentally different ends therewith.
• The will to overcome an emotion is ultimately only the will of another or several other emotions—there is no escape from the economy of drives, only a shifting of dominance among them.
  • “The will to overcome an emotion, is ultimately only the will of another, or of several other, emotions.” —Nietzsche
  • Not only our reason, but also our conscience, truckles to our strongest impulse—the tyrant in us.

The Natural History of Morals

Morality has never been subjected to genuine scientific analysis—philosophers have merely formalized prevailing moralities rather than comparing and classifying them—and once morality is examined historically and cross-culturally, it reveals itself as a form of tyranny that, like all long constraint, has paradoxically produced the finest human capacities.

• The ‘science of morals’ remains a pretentious misnomer—philosophers have never studied morality comparatively or empirically but have merely provided new formulations of their own inherited faith in prevailing morality, calling it ’the basis’ of ethics.
  • Schopenhauer’s claim that ’neminem laede, immo omnes quantum potes juva’ is the real basis of ethics sought for centuries like the philosopher’s stone is an example of this—and Schopenhauer, a pessimist and repudiator of the world, nonetheless played the flute daily after dinner.
  • Systems of morals are only a sign-language of the emotions—each reveals what the author is, in what order the deepest impulses of his nature stand to each other.
• Every system of morals is a form of tyranny against nature and reason—but this is not an objection to morality, because it is precisely long constraint and obedience in one direction that produces all genuinely great human achievements in art, thought, and character.
  • Everything of the nature of freedom, elegance, boldness, dance, and masterly certainty—in thought, administration, speaking, art, and conduct—has only developed by means of the tyranny of such arbitrary law.
  • The discipline of European thinkers who only thought to prove something predetermined—as in Christian-moral explanation—educated the spirit; slavery in the coarser and finer sense is apparently an indispensable means of spiritual education.
• The pre-moral period judged actions by consequences; the moral period judged by intentions (intention-morality); the coming ultra-moral period will recognize that the decisive value of an action lies in what is NOT intentional—in what the intention conceals rather than reveals.
  • Morality in the sense of intention-morality has been a prejudice, perhaps a prematureness, probably something of the same rank as astrology and alchemy—something that must be surmounted.
  • The surmounting of morality, even the self-surmounting of morality, is the long-secret labour reserved for the most refined and most wicked consciences of today.
• MORALITY IN EUROPE AT PRESENT IS HERDING-ANIMAL MORALITY, and therefore, as we understand the matter, only one kind of human morality, beside which, before which, and after which many other moralities, and above all HIGHER moralities, are or should be possible.
• The gregarious instinct of obedience has been transmitted and strengthened throughout human history at the cost of the art of command—Europe has produced a ‘moral hypocrisy of the commanding class’ that must justify its authority by pretending to execute higher orders rather than issuing its own.
  • The appearance of Napoleon was the last great proof that an absolute ruler is a blessing and deliverance for gregarious Europeans—the history of Napoleon’s influence is almost the history of the higher happiness the entire century attained.
  • Attempt after attempt is made to replace commanders with the summing together of clever gregarious men—all representative constitutions are of this origin.
• European morality at present is herd-animal morality—a historically contingent form masquerading as morality itself—and the democratic movement is its political inheritance from Christianity, driving Europe toward a mediocre gregarious type while making new philosophers and commanders ever more urgently necessary.
  • We believe that severity, violence, slavery, danger, and everything wicked and terrible in man serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite—we do not even say enough when we say this much.
  • The democratic movement and the socialist and anarchist movements are all at one in their fundamental hostility to every form of society other than the autonomous herd, and in their deadly hatred of suffering generally.
• The Jews performed the miracle of the inversion of valuations—fusing ‘rich,’ ‘godless,’ ‘wicked,’ and ‘violent’ into synonyms, and ‘poor’ with ‘saint’—thereby initiating the slave-insurrection in morals that Christianity then spread across the world.
  • The Jewish prophets for the first time coined the word ‘world’ as a term of reproach—in this inversion of valuations the significance of the Jewish people is to be found.
  • The beast of prey and man of prey (e.g., Caesar Borgia) are fundamentally misunderstood so long as one seeks a ‘morbidness’ in them—moralists here betray their own timidity, which Nietzsche labels ‘Morals as Timidity.’

We Scholars

Modern science has emancipated itself from philosophy and now wrongly aspires to replace it, but the scientific man is a mirror and instrument—not a commander or value-creator—and the genuine philosopher, who is rare and must be bred, is distinguished precisely by the capacity and obligation to create new values and legislate the future of mankind.

• The emancipation of scientific specialists from philosophy is a symptom of democratic disorganization—scholars now mock or ignore philosophy, but their contempt reflects the contemptibleness of recent philosophers rather than a genuine superiority of science.
  • Philosophy reduced to a ’theory of knowledge’—a diffident science of epochs and doctrine of forbearance that rigorously denies itself the right to enter—is philosophy in its last throes, an end, an agony.
  • Schopenhauer’s unintelligent rage against Hegel succeeded in severing the whole of the last generation of Germans from its connection with German culture and the historical sense.
• The objective man—the ideal scientific scholar—is a mirror and instrument, not a goal or a commander; his very virtues (impartiality, hospitality to all experience) render him selfless in the bad sense, incapable of affirming or denying, and ultimately useless as a philosopher.
  • The objective man is in truth a mirror accustomed to prostration before everything that wants to be known—he is no ‘purpose in himself,’ not outgoing nor upgoing, no complementary man in whom the rest of existence justifies itself.
  • He is only genuine so far as he can be objective; his mirroring and eternally self-polishing soul no longer knows how to affirm, no longer how to deny; he does not command; neither does he destroy.
• Skepticism—widespread in Europe as a consequence of racial and class mixing—is a physiological disease of the will, a paralysis of the capacity for independent decision, masked as ‘objectiveness’ or ’the scientific spirit’; the strong skepticism of the Frederician type, by contrast, is a form of daring manliness.
  • The disease of the will is diffused unequally over Europe, worst where civilization has longest prevailed; France currently has the most infirm will; Russia has the strongest stored-up will.
  • Frederick the Great’s hard, dangerous skepticism—which despises and nevertheless grasps, undermines and takes possession—represents the German form of skepticism as continued fearlessness of gaze.
• The genuine philosopher must be distinguished sharply from the philosophical worker or scholar—philosophical workers (like Kant and Hegel) formalize and systematize existing valuations, whereas real philosophers create values, legislate the future, and use all past knowledge as a hammer.
  • Their ‘knowing’ is CREATING, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is—WILL TO POWER.
  • The real philosopher must have traversed all the stages the scientific workers occupy—critic, dogmatist, historian, poet, moralist, seer—but his actual task begins only after: to create values.
• The philosopher has always been the bad conscience of his age—placing the vivisector’s knife to the breast of the virtues of his time—and today greatness must mean the capacity to stand alone, bear immense responsibility, and be capable of being fundamentally different from the gregarious norm.
  • In the face of a world of ‘modern ideas’ that confines everyone to a specialty, the philosopher must determine worth and rank by the amount and variety of what a man can bear and take upon himself.
  • Napoleon’s astonishment before Goethe—‘VOILA UN HOMME!’—reveals how completely the older concept of ‘German spirit’ as soft and poetical had been the prevailing expectation.

Our Virtues

The virtues of contemporary Europeans—including honesty, historical sense, and sympathy—are re-examined as mixed achievements riddled with hidden instincts, vanity, and self-deception, while Nietzsche defends a higher, harder conception of virtue rooted in rank, strength, and creative suffering rather than egalitarian compassion.

• Modern Europeans are determined by multiple competing moralities simultaneously, so their actions are rarely unambiguous or unequivocal—they shine alternately in different colors, reflecting the complicated moral firmament they inhabit.
  • As in the stellar firmament there are sometimes two suns which determine the path of one planet, so modern men are determined by different moralities, and their actions are seldom unequivocal.
  • Morality as attitude—performing virtue publicly—has become opposed to contemporary taste in the same way that religion as attitude became opposed to the taste of the previous generation.
• The contemporary cult of sympathy and ‘unselfishness’ is driven not by genuine altruism but by self-contempt—preaching sympathy is a way for the man of ‘modern ideas’ to externalize his own dissatisfaction with himself.
  • Wherever sympathy is preached nowadays—and no other religion is any longer preached—the psychologist will hear a hoarse, groaning, genuine note of self-contempt beneath the vanity and noise.
  • Well-being as commonly understood is an END, a condition which renders man ludicrous and contemptible; the discipline of great suffering is what has produced all human elevation.
• The ‘historical sense’—Europe’s sixth sense, arising from democratic mixing of races and classes—is a plebeian virtue that enables access to all past cultures but is fundamentally in conflict with good taste, because good taste requires the selective nobility of a culture perfected and at rest in itself.
  • As men of the ‘historical sense’ we are unpretentious, unselfish, modest, brave, habituated to self-renunciation—but we are perhaps not very tasteful, and find it most difficult to grasp the essentially noble in any culture’s moment of golden self-sufficiency.
  • The historical sense implies almost the sense and instinct for everything, and immediately proves itself to be an ignoble sense—it makes Homer accessible to us in a way the aristocratic French of the seventeenth century could not manage.
• The discipline of suffering, of GREAT suffering—know ye not that it is only THIS discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto?
• Systems of ethics that measure worth by pleasure and pain—hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, eudaemonism—are naïve modes of thought that any person with creative powers and an artist’s conscience will look down upon with scorn, because they ignore the productive necessity of great suffering.
  • In man CREATURE and CREATOR are united—what is meant to be fashioned, bruised, forged, stretched, and refined necessarily must suffer; our reverse sympathy resists the pampering sympathy as the worst of all enervation.
  • Nietzsche’s sympathy is not for social distress or the hereditary vicious, but a loftier sympathy that sees how man dwarfs himself through the contemporary compassion-morality.
• Higher spirituality is itself a product of moral qualities accumulated across generations—it is the synthesis and spiritualization of justice—so the shallow moralist who demands equal standing before God with the spiritually gifted person is unknowingly demanding the precondition of that very spirituality.
  • Lofty spirituality is precisely the spiritualizing of justice, and the beneficent severity which knows that it is authorized to maintain gradations of rank in the world—even among things, not only among men.
  • Moral judging and condemning is the favourite revenge of the intellectually shallow on those who are less so—they need the belief in God in order to enforce ’equality of all before God.’
• Honesty—the one virtue free spirits cannot discard—must be cultivated with hardness and perversity, not made into a decorative ornament or a new form of vanity; the free spirit must be willing to use all his ‘devils’ in service of this sole remaining virtue.
  • Every virtue inclines to stupidity, every stupidity to virtue: ‘stupid to the point of sanctity,’ they say in Russia—let us be careful lest out of pure honesty we eventually become saints and bores.
  • The task is to translate man back into nature—to recognize HOMO NATURA behind all the falsifying interpretations scratched over the original text, with fearless Oedipus-eyes and stopped Ulysses-ears.

Peoples and Countries

Nietzsche surveys European nations, their musical and cultural characters, and the physiological process of European unification, arguing that democratic levelling is simultaneously producing mediocre herd-men and the conditions for exceptional new tyrants, and that a new ruling caste must be deliberately cultivated to give Europe a single will directed thousands of years ahead.

• Wagner’s overture to the Mastersinger exemplifies the German spirit—manifold, formless, young and aged simultaneously, rich with futurity but lacking grace, logic, and southern clarity—revealing that Germans belong to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow but have as yet no today.
  • German music has the pride to presuppose two centuries of music as still living in order to be understood—an honour to Germans that such pride did not miscalculate.
  • With Schumann, German music was threatened with its greatest danger—losing the voice for the soul of Europe and sinking into a merely national affair, as contrasted with Beethoven and Mozart who were European events.
• The democratic movement across Europe is not primarily a political phenomenon but a physiological process—the slow emergence of a super-national, nomadic, maximally adaptable type of man who requires a master, while simultaneously creating conditions under which exceptional strong individuals become stronger than ever before.
  • While the capacity for adaptation makes the powerfulness of the type impossible and produces talkative, weak-willed workmen, the strong man will in individual cases become stronger and richer than ever—owing to unprejudiced schooling and immense variety of practice.
  • Europe wishes to be one—all the most profound and large-minded men of the century (Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heine, Schopenhauer, Wagner) were in their deepest tendency preparers of the European of the future.
• A new ruling caste must be deliberately bred for Europe—a persistent, dreadful will that can set aims thousands of years ahead—to end the comedy of petty statism and dynastic and democratic many-willedness; without it Europe faces the Russian threat and internal subversion.
  • Nietzsche would prefer a threatening increase in Russia’s posture sufficient to compel Europe to acquire one will by means of a new caste ruling the Continent.
  • The time for petty politics is past; the next century will bring the struggle for the dominion of the world—the compulsion to great politics.
• The democratising of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the rearing of TYRANTS—taking the word in all its meanings, even in its most spiritual sense.
• The English are not a philosophical race—Bacon, Hobbes, Hume, and Locke all abase the idea of the philosopher—and their need for Christianity as a moralizing discipline reveals the coarseness their piety is designed to conceal, while their mediocre thinkers (Darwin, Mill, Spencer) produce truths best suited to mediocre minds.
  • What is called ‘modern ideas’ or ’the ideas of the eighteenth century’ is of English origin; the French were their actors and first victims; the European noblesse of sentiment and taste is the work of France, while European plebeianism of modern ideas is England’s work.
  • There are truths which are best recognized by mediocre minds because they are best adapted for them—Darwin, Mill, and Spencer begin to gain ascendancy in the middle-class region of European taste.
• France remains the seat of the most refined European culture and taste, possessing three irreducible superiorities: the capacity for artistic emotion and l’art pour l’art, an ancient moralistic culture producing unmatched psychological sensitivity, and a successful north-south synthesis of temperament that makes French thinkers natural ‘good Europeans.’
  • Henri Beyle (Stendhal)—that remarkable anticipatory man who traversed several centuries of the European soul with Napoleonic tempo—may be noted as the most successful expression of genuine French curiosity in the domain of delicate psychological thrills.
  • Bizet has seen a new beauty and seduction, discovered a piece of the South in music—for the person who loves the South as a school of recovery for spiritual and sensuous ills, Bizet represents the right direction against German musical influence.
• The Jewish people are the strongest, toughest, and purest race in Europe—they altered the moral landscape of two millennia through their inversion of valuations—and a European thinker concerned with the future must calculate upon them as one of the surest factors, welcoming their absorption into Europe rather than persecuting them.
  • Europe owes the Jews the grand style in morality, the fearfulness and majesty of infinite demands—the whole Romanticism and sublimity of moral questionableness that constitutes the most attractive element in European culture.
  • Anti-Semitic bawlers should be banished; the stronger types of new Germanism could productively enter into relation with Jews, combining Jewish intellectual patience and money-genius with the Prussian hereditary art of commanding and obeying.

From the Heights

A concluding poem in fifteen stanzas that dramatizes Nietzsche’s philosophical solitude—the midday of life where old friends no longer belong, the ascent to icy heights where one becomes unrecognizable even to oneself, and the joyful expectation of new friends and Zarathustra’s arrival as the feast of feasts.

• The poem dramatizes the philosopher’s midday of life as a moment of radical transformation where old friends become strangers, one’s own identity becomes uncertain, and the ascent to lonely heights has produced a self that can no longer be recognized by those who knew it before.
  • The speaker has unlearned man, God, curse, and prayer on lonesome ice-lorn fells—become a ghost haunting the glaciers bare, changed in hand, gait, and face such that friends can no longer recognize him.
  • Old friends are urged to go without wrath—they could not live in the farthest realm of ice and scar, which requires one to be a hunter who can soar like chamois.
• The poem ends with a feast of feasts at which Zarathustra arrives as the guest of guests—light and dark become one in a wedding morning, and the world laughs as the grisly veil of isolation is torn—signaling that the philosopher’s solitude was prologue to a new community of the future.
  • At midday ’twas, when one became as two—the wizard-friend who wrought the song is the midday-friend, and the arrival of Zarathustra marks the moment where philosophical isolation completes itself in affirmation.
  • New friends are called for with confident joy: ‘Come! Come! The time is right!’—mirroring the opening stanzas but now from the position of earned rather than anticipated transformation.